Avangate is celebrating 10 years of excellence in ecommerce. We’re extremely proud of how far we’ve come and how many customers we’ve helped to easily sell software and digital products globally since those early days. Over the past 10 years, we’ve reached a lot of milestones, and adapted to a lot of trends. In this blog post and accompanying infographic, we invite you to take a walk down memory lane (or up the achievement mountain) and reminisce about where we started, what we achieved, and where we are today.
The beginning…
It might be hard to believe that when we setup the first Avangate entity in 2006 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, shareware and electronic software downloads were popular, and physical CDs were still the main way to back up your software. One-off payments were the norm, and clients expected perpetual licenses. Yet, there were still many challenges related to ecommerce for digital goods at the time and we focused our initial efforts on making it easy to sell shareware and downloadable software online. The industry was moving fast even then; as early as 2007, we started investing in renewal management as we began to look closely at the subscriptions space. Soon after, we reached some major milestones, such as opening our first sales office in the U.S. and achieving PCI DSS Level 1 certification.
Fast growth
Growing adoption of our online eCommerce tools sparked interest from investors: 3TS Cisco Growth Fund made an investment in Avangate in 2011, and not long after, Francisco Partners acquired us in 2013. Their involvement helped us ramp up our growth in key areas such as subscription billing, conversion optimization, retention. We also started racking up awards, and Gartner named us a “Cool” Company in 2013. Fast forward to 2016, when we made our debut into the Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce – an achievement that made us particularly proud.
Today’s dynamic world
A lot has changed in the dynamic tech world in the past ten years, and, clearly, eCommerce (or digital commerce as it’s sometimes called) couldn’t sit still. The software industry is increasingly shifting from downloads to SaaS subscriptions, (many computers don’t even have CD drives at all anymore, right?). Products have become a reason to sell services, instead of one-time purchases in their own right. Companies need to experiment with emerging business models and do it fast.
Celebrating success with the Avangate Awards
Needless to say we’re very proud of our achievements over the years and deeply grateful to all of the customers, partners, employees and friends who helped us get this far. Which brings us to a key point. We thought, what better way to celebrate a decade of achievements than with the clients and partners who’ve helped us get this far?
To show our gratitude, we’re launching the Avangate Awards to celebrate excellence in innovation, enabling valuable digital offerings, global expansion and optimal use of the Avangate platform and services, across several categories. Stay tuned until tomorrow when we announce the nominees for each category. The big day is June 22nd, when we announce the Avangate Awards WINNERS.
Until then, do you have a favorite Avangate memory from the past 10 years? We invite you to share it in the comments.
